María Elena Álvarez Buylla, director of the National Council of Science and Technology.
President López Obrador and the head of the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) touted a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday.
A low-cost vaccine candidate using technology developed by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York was described by López Obrador as a “motherland vaccine.”
The research behind the development of the vaccine, to be called Patria, is an achievement of the Mexican government, he said.
Conacyt director María Elena Álvarez-Buylla said the project will enable Mexico “to recover sovereignty in … the production of vaccines.”
She said the vaccine candidate will be used in human clinical trials in Mexico once testing on a range of animals has been completed. She predicted that 90 adults will receive shots of the vaccine later this month or in May. The Conacyt chief also said the vaccine could receive emergency-use authorization from drug regulator Cofepris as soon as December.
The federal government invested 150 million pesos (US $7.5 million) in its development.
López Obrador said the vaccine’s name was inspired by Ramón López Velarde, an early 20th-century poet from Zacatecas.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to indicate that the Patria vaccine, rather than having been developed in the U.S., is being developed in Mexico. Mexico News Daily regrets the error.
Visitors go for a camel ride, an attraction in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur.
Over the Easter break hotels in Los Cabos registered 49% capacity, almost at the 50% limit permitted by Covid-19 restrictions.
For two consecutive weeks the holiday destination in Baja California Sur saw an average of 9,000 tourists per day with the lowest occupancy levels registered on April 6 at 42%.
San José del Cabo International Airport saw 60 flights a day during the two weeks of Easter, and transported approximately 90,000 tourists. That generated an estimated US $20 million, based on vacationers spending between $120 and $150 daily, and $400 on a hotel room, at an average of 2.3 guests per room.
The president of the Los Cabos hotel association, Lizly Orcí Fregoso, said the 2021 Easter season broke records for the highest nightly rate in hotels; nearly US $400 per night compared to around $300 in previous years.
She added that 60% of tourists to Los Cabos were from the United States, mainly from California, Arizona and Texas. Fregoso said the number of Covid-19 infections identified among tourists has remained under 1%, and that no tourist has required hospitalization.
In La Paz hotels were also close to the 50% limit for the whole month of March and until April 11. The 20,000 mostly domestic tourists contributed around $3.7 million to the region.
A Honduran woman and child near Mexico's border with Guatemala.
Almost a month ago the federal government announced a temporary closure of the southern border to nonessential traffic. This week, the White House announced that Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala would deploy troops “to make crossing the borders more difficult.”
Yet migrants continue to stream into the country en route to the United States.
According to a report published Wednesday by The Guardian, Central American migrants were crossing into Mexico on a recent morning at Frontera Corozal, a remote border town on the Usumacinta River in Chiapas, without having to show documents to anyone.
The newspaper said the situation “looked like business as usual,” noting that groups of men, women and children were disembarking from boats onto Mexican soil before getting into taxis and speeding past an immigration office to a crossroads. There they boarded vans for the next leg of their journey north: an approximately 150-kilometer trip to the town of Palenque, Chiapas.
There are police checkpoints on the Frontera Corozal-Palenque highway, but according to migrants, they were able to pass by paying — or were robbed by the officers they encountered.
“They’ve taken our money, and now we’re dead broke,” 27-year-old Christian, part of a group of Honduran construction workers, told The Guardian.
“And now we have to deal with the military. We need to figure out how we get north. We are always fighting and figuring out a way to get there.”
Shortly after he took office in late 2018, President López Obrador pledged to clean up Mexico’s immigration and customs forces, which he said were “rotten to the core.” He also vowed that his administration would treat migrants with respect and give them protection.
But human rights activists say that soldiers, police officers and immigration officials continue to commit crimes against migrants, including robbery, extortion and kidnapping.
“It’s a cartel,” said Gabriel Romero, director of a migrant shelter near Mexico’s border with Guatemala. “They [the authorities] are acting in cahoots with [smugglers] … with taxi and bus drivers. It’s a network taking advantage of migrants,” he said.
Still, migrants fleeing poverty and violence in countries such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are prepared to risk their lives in their quest to reach the United States.
Migrants arrive in Chiapas after crossing the Usumacinta River.
Even increased enforcement — the government deployed the National Guard in 2019 to stem migration flows and thus appease then United States president Donald Trump — failed to stop Central Americans and people from more distant countries, including Haiti, Cuba and even African nations, from attempting to reach the United States via a long journey that includes crossing Mexico’s southern border.
Crackdowns instead have forced migrants to take riskier, more remote routes to enter and travel through Mexico. They are consequently exposed to an even greater risk of becoming victims of crimes such as robbery, rape, abduction and murder.
The latest crackdown on migrants may be even less effective in stopping the flows of people, according to Tonatiuh Guillén, a former chief of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute who resigned in 2019 after the federal government buckled in the face of Trump’s threat to impose blanket tariffs on Mexican goods if the country didn’t do more to curb migration.
“The flow of migrants will continue moving, mostly because they’re in small groups … and a significant part of it is controlled by human traffickers,” he said.
“[Human traffickers] have infrastructure, money and complicit relationships [with the authorities],” Guillén said.
“[In addition] governments in Mexico, the United States and Central America have never really put much of an effort into controlling these trafficking organizations.”
López Obrador and United States Vice President Kamala Harris, who is leading the U.S. government’s efforts to deter migration, spoke last week. López Obrador said the two countries are “willing to join forces in the fight against human trafficking and to protect human rights, especially of children.”
The president and vice president also said they would work toward Central American development and agreed on the urgency of carrying out emergency humanitarian aid programs.
However, it is unlikely that any measures agreed to by the Mexican and U.S. governments will significantly diminish the various factors pushing Central Americans to flee their homelands.
According to The Guardian report, migrants traveling through southern Mexico said they had escaped situations of extreme poverty, hunger and gang violence. They also spoke of the dire consequences of drought and hurricanes and criticized politicians who allow corruption to run rampant.
“Hurricane Eta swept away everything and left us in the street with our children,” said 34-year-old Leticia, who fled Honduras with her husband and three children. “That’s why we decided to leave and search for a future.”
Johan Martínez told The Guardian that he left Honduras because criminals were forcing him to make extortion payments even though his income as a welder was meager.
After showing the newspaper’s reporter a gunshot scar on his abdomen and his fake front teeth that replaced those knocked out by angry gangsters seeking payment, Martínez said that the arrival of United States President Joe Biden, who has moved to roll back some of his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies, gave him the “opportunity of a lifetime” to seek asylum in the U.S.
Many other Central Americans, who have flocked to the Mexico-U.S. border in recent months, feel the same.
Human rights officials have taken precautionary measures to protect the sisters of British-Mexican citizen Claudia Uruchurtu, 48, who disappeared on March 26 in Asunción Nochixtlán, Oaxaca.
The sisters say they have received death threats via phone call and acts of intimidation at their homes in Oaxaca ever since they began to demand justice for their sister.
Elizabeth Uruchurtu, who normally resides in England, lobbied the country’s foreign ministry on her behalf, which then contacted human rights groups in Mexico.
The president of Oaxaca’s human rights commission, Bernardo Rodríguez Alamilla, said it has established a security escort for the family and is demanding that security and justice officials do not victimize or violate the human rights of the family members in the search for the missing woman.
Claudia Uruchurtu went missing after a protest outside government headquarters in Nochixtlán, where people had gathered after a local resident was beaten. According to Uruchurtu’s relatives, witnesses saw Claudia being grabbed and pushed into a car.
The state attorney general has summoned the mayor of Nochixtlán to give evidence.
Michoacán politician Raúl Morón, left, Morena Party head Mario Delgado and Guerrero politician Félix Salgado, right, outside the National Electoral Institute headquarters.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) has upheld its decision to bar two Morena party candidates for governor from contesting the June 6 elections because they failed to report their pre-campaign spending.
The INE general council ratified the disqualification of both Félix Salgado, the ruling party’s candidate in Guerrero, and Raúl Morón, the Morena candidate in Michoacán.
The decision defied the advice of President López Obrador, who suggested that Salgado and Morón be sanctioned but allowed to contest the elections.
On Wednesday he called the INE’s decision an “attack on democracy.” In a democracy, citizens have the freedom to choose their political representatives, but the INE ruling goes against that principle, he told reporters at his regular news conference.
“Why don’t they leave it to the people of Michoacán, the people of Guerrero, to decide? If they [the would-be candidates] are bad citizens, can’t the people grade them, fail them or elect them? … We’re facing an unprecedented action; nothing like this has happened before,” López Obrador said.
“If we’re taking the first steps to establish an authentic democracy, and we’re going to strike a blow to it in this way, what I said is not an exaggeration: it’s an attack on democracy.”
The president said Tuesday that he didn’t have confidence in the INE in its current form and will present an initiative after this year’s elections to reform it to ensure that it is “truly autonomous and independent.”
INE president Lorenzo Córdova said at Tuesday’s council meeting that the institute was obliged to act in accordance with the law in determining the punishments that should apply to the two would-be candidates for governor. They could have avoided their candidacies being deregistered if they had complied with the law that required them to report their spending, he said.
Morena’s representative to the INE, Sergio Gutiérrez Luna, accused Córdova of playing a “dirty game” that benefits opposition parties.
Both Salgado, an accused rapist who this week threatened to stop the elections from happening in Guerrero if he isn’t allowed to run, and Morón told supporters gathered outside the INE’s Mexico City headquarters that they would again challenge the decisions against them before the electoral tribunal.
“The National Electoral Institute again issued an illegal, arbitrary and disproportionate ruling that violates the political-electoral rights of the residents of Michoacán,” the latter said.
Morena party national president Mario Delgado said legal action will be launched against the decision to bar Salgado and Morón from contesting the elections, which will renew the entire lower house of federal Congress. Governors will also be elected in 15 states.
“We’re going to challenge this robbery that we’ve just seen tonight,” Delgado said.
“… In these critical moments, we must always remember the teachings of López Obrador. He also suffered attacks, lies and robberies,” Delgado said, adding that the president — who claimed that electoral fraud robbed him of the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections — always challenged decisions against him peacefully and in accordance with the law.
Casa Luna owners Al and Agatha Doerksen daughter Susan (second from left) and her family take an enthusiastic dive in the rental home's tiled pool.
One of my favorite things to do each year during my last weeks in Zihuatanejo is to upgrade my accommodation.
Indulging in a little more luxury is a guilty pleasure, as many of the rentals here include a pool and maid service. Usually, I time my reservations for after Semana Santa and when crowds are long gone to get better prices. That way, I can be assured of some solitude and blissful quiet — perfect for gearing up to Canada’s busier lifestyle and for staying within my budget.
This year, I lucked out when friends of mine, Al and Agatha Doerksen, mentioned they had purchased an Airbnb in 2019 on La Ropa beach, Villa Casa Luna.
Like many longtimers to Zihuatanejo, I knew of the place through my acquaintance with the former owners, Patsy, a well-known photographer and the late Joe LoGiudice, a trained architect and former Soho art dealer, as well as a film producer and activist. Still, I’d never had the pleasure of experiencing it.
Villa Casa Luna has a history of having housed many celebrities, including musician Keith Richards and activist Abbie Hoffman. Numerous other artists — like Jose Luis Cuevas and Pop Art icon Larry Rivers — and actors like Lauren Hutton and Janet “Viva” Hoffman were also frequent visitors to the area.
Casa Luna is big enough that multiple families can vacation together and hit the beach nearby.
I opted to stay in the lovely casita. From the moment the red electric gates opened, I felt as if I were stepping into a secret garden.
A maze of lush vegetation and bamboo trees, as well as rare orchids and other plants, dotted the path to a cottage tucked in the corner of the property. I could see the main house to the right of me, nearly hidden by foliage — precisely the peace, quiet and privacy I wanted.
A sizeable inviting porch, complete with couch and hammock, beckoned me, and I envisioned hours of napping and reading in the cool shade of the tiled roof.
Steps away from the cottage and behind a bamboo door is a large swimming pool. Just a few meters from that are the beginnings of the reconstruction of another future casita, complete with an outdoor shower.
As for the casita itself, it was like stepping back in time to the ’60s, and ’70s — when it was initially built by the LoGiudices — yet there is every convenience you would hope to find in a well-stocked home.
The black-checkered floors in the open-concept kitchen, dining and living area were the first clue to the theme, and the painted wood cupboards and planked walls complemented stone counters and a massive stone sink. Charming, too, are the numerous windows that let in plenty of light, adorned with wooden shutters. I particularly loved the terra-cotta tiles in the Mexican-styled bedroom and bathroom.
Owners Al and Agatha Doerksen take a break at day’s end. They bought the home in their retirement.
The main house, a mixture of modern and traditional Mexican architecture, boasts an additional four rentable rooms, complete with kitchen and living space. The whole house is perfect for larger groups. The open-air rooms look out onto more gardens, giving you the feeling that you are one with nature no matter where you are.
The whole complex, which sits on a full acre of developed and undeveloped land, is a large one, and I was curious why a couple well into retirement would undertake such a project.
As Canadians originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba (and now southwest Ontario), I learned that the Doerksens had an illustrious past as well.
The pair had traveled and lived in many parts of the world in teaching and consultant jobs, including Calcutta — where they were next-door neighbors to Mother Theresa — to Germany and Colorado.
“It’s really because of our daughter, Allison,” says Agatha, an artist whose work has showcased locally and abroad. “We were sitting on the second-story balcony of the condo we own next door when she noticed the for-sale sign. Although we could see just bits of the property and were acquainted with our neighbor, we had never actually been inside its walls. Of course, we were curious and decided to check it out.”
“Al and I have the visions and dreams — along with Allison, who invested her own money into the property — but it is our kids and grandchildren who will have the energy to see them through. Future plans will hopefully involve meeting the needs of that vision while protecting what is already here, and that honors the history and people of Mexico.”
The home’s courtyard garden is the perfect place to relax and reconnect with nature.
“I really felt that is this place where I could do my best art,” says Agatha. Her passion, she explained, is to somehow incorporate nature with Allison’s plans for commerce through her beeswax candle business.
There are also expansion plans — perhaps more casitas and yoga or meditation retreats. However, with the advent of Covid-19, some of those plans are on hold for the time being.
For now, keeping afloat, making plans, and ensuring that the place renews with new life seems to be the priority for a brighter future filled with endless possibilities.
Those interested in experiencing this piece of paradise, which is mere steps to Playa La Ropa, can do so by visiting Villa Casa Luna’s website for contact information and further details.
The writer divides her time between Canada and Zihuatanejo.
Nearly half of those who answered a recent survey by the firm Consulta Mitofsky said that they had a good opinion of Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell.
About one in seven Mexicans doesn’t want a Covid-19 vaccination shot, according to the results of a new poll.
The Mexican consulting agency Mitofsky’s most recent national coronavirus survey, conducted on April 9–11 with 1,000 people, found that 13.3% of respondents don’t want to be vaccinated against the disease that has claimed more than 300,000 lives in Mexico.
Just over three-quarters of those polled, or 76.4%, said they have already had a jab or are waiting for their opportunity to get vaccinated, while 10.3% said that they didn’t know whether they would get a shot or not.
Among those who said that they don’t want to be vaccinated, the most popularly cited reason among eight provided by Mitofsky was that they want to wait and see what effect vaccination has on the first groups of inoculated people. Almost one in five respondents, or 19.7%, cited that reason.
Fear of vaccines or injections was cited by 13.4% while 12.4% mentioned the risk of adverse reactions such as blood clots.
About one in 13 of those who don’t want to get vaccinated, or 7.5%, said that Covid-19 doesn’t exist or isn’t a serious disease. Another 3.9% said that vaccines are ineffective against the virus.
A response option provided by the survey — “the disease and the vaccine are part of a conspiracy to reduce the population” — was chosen by 10.2%. Another 4.4% said the objective of vaccination is to control people.
Religious reasons were cited by 3.3%.
In response to questions about the vaccination distribution process, the majority had positive feelings about it. The survey found that 71.9% of respondents believe that the organization of the process has been very good or good in the state where they live. However, 19.4% said that it has been very bad or bad.
As of Monday night, just over 11.7 million vaccine doses had been administered, mostly to health workers and people aged 60 and over.
The poll also found that 26.7% of respondents are more afraid of contracting the coronavirus than of being a victim of crime or being affected negatively by the pandemic in an economic sense. Just over a third of those polled said that being a victim of crime was their biggest fear while 31.7% said they were most afraid of adverse economic consequences.
However, when the other two options were removed, 76.5% of those polled said they were very or somewhat afraid of catching the virus. A slightly lower percentage of respondents, 62.4%, said they were very or somewhat afraid of dying of Covid-19.
As for President López Obrador’s management of the crisis — which has been widely criticized by health experts — 58% of respondents said that they approved, and 40.1% said they disapproved.
Just under half of those polled said they had a good opinion of Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who has led the government’s pandemic response, while 35.7% said the opposite.
When the poll asked respondents to offer an opinion about the origin of the coronavirus, 35.5% said that they believed that the virus was created in a laboratory and intentionally let out of the lab to allow it to spread. An additional 12.8% of respondents said they believed the virus was created in a lab and that it escaped by accident.
Only 29.4% of those polled said that they believed that the origin of the virus is zoological and that it subsequently jumped to humans, while 22.3% said that they didn’t know where SARS-CoV-2 came from.
The arrest is a blow to the navy, considered Mexico's most trusted security force.
Thirty marines were arrested last Friday in connection with the forced disappearance of an unspecified number of people in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, in 2014, the navy said in a statement.
The Ministry of the Navy said Monday that the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR), acting on arrest warrants, detained the marines, who allegedly carried out the abductions and presumed murders while deployed to the northern border city.
The navy said that it made the marines available to the FGR so it can carry out the appropriate investigations.
It didn’t give any further details about the crimes.
It is the largest arrest of military personnel in connection with the disappearance of civilians in recent years and a heavy blow to the navy, which is generally considered Mexico’s most trustworthy security force.
Tamaulipas is one of Mexico’s most violent states and has one of the highest missing persons rates in the country.
The navy was accused of involvement in the disappearance of at least 57 people in Tamaulipas in the first half of 2018, and the United Nations said in May of that year that there were “strong indications” that federal security forces were responsible for the disappearance of 23 people, including at least five minors, in the state.
Forced disappearances are seldom fully investigated in Mexico and impunity for the crime, as is the case for many other offenses including homicide, is extremely high.
The federal government said last week that more than 85,000 people have disappeared since 2006, the year former president Felipe Calderón launched a military offensive against Mexico’s notorious drug cartels.
Criminal organizations are to blame for most disappearances, but corrupt security force members — including municipal and state police, marines and soldiers — have also been accused or convicted of abductions and murders. For example, the army has long been suspected of involvement in the high-profile case of 43 teaching students who disappeared in Guerrero in 2014.
Hilton's Yucatán Resort Playa del Carmen will open this year.
Hotel giant Hilton has 31 hotels in development in Mexico which will all open by the end of 2022.
One of the biggest projects is the Hilton Cancún complex, an all-inclusive resort with 715 rooms 20 kilometres south of Cancún’s hotel zone, set to open late this year.
Another is the The Yucatán Resort Playa Del Carmen, a 60-room all-inclusive resort which will open this summer.
Mexico has the fifth largest concentration of Hilton hotels anywhere in the world.
“In Mexico we are seeing a great deal of interest in vacation and leisure destinations and in traditional destinations, led by Cancún, Vallarta and Los Cabos,” said Mario Carbone, Hilton’s development director for Mexico and Central America.
“The necessity to travel is even more evident after so long ‘trapped’ in our homes, so we predict a boom in interest for vacation travel. That will be the first thing we see, followed by business travel, which we are very confident is going to recover in the long run,” Carbone adds.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic saw Hilton invest more in hotel conversions, where existing infrastructure is incorporated into the Hilton brand, such as the DoubleTree complex in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, which opened on October 1.
Last year Hilton’s total projects in Latin America went from a 20% concentration on hotel conversions to 50%.
The company opened 400 hotels in 2020, 14 of which were in Latin America, and now has 100 complexes in development in the region.
A file photo of migrants at the Mexico-US border wall.
Mexicans are attempting to cross illegally into the United States in numbers not seen for more than a decade.
Some 147,000 Mexicans were detained by U.S. border agents in the first three months of the year, a figure equivalent to two-thirds of all arrests of Mexicans by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in 2020.
If the trend continues, almost 590,000 Mexicans will be intercepted by the CBP this year, which would be the highest number since 2008, when more than 600,000 were detained.
The spike in the number of Mexicans trying to enter the U.S. without going through official immigration channels comes after years of decreases in migration flows across the northern border. In 2017 — for the first time ever — the number of Mexicans returning home from the United States exceeded the number of Mexicans heading north.
Migration expert Eunice Rendón told the newspaper Milenio that CBP arrests of Mexicans last month were more than four times higher than the level seen in recent years.
The number of detentions by fiscal year (October to September). This year’s figure, reflecting six months of data, is already at 93% of last year’s total. milenio
“In March, for example, border patrol captured 171,000 people, of whom 68,000 were Mexicans. … What we have seen in other years is [the detention of] 15,000 Mexicans [per month],” she said.
Rendón attributed the surge to economic factors related to the coronavirus pandemic as well as displacement caused by violence.
In the almost 2 1/2 years since President López Obrador took office, about 776,000 Mexicans have been detained by the CBP, meaning that arrests during the six-year term of the current government are on track to exceed the number recorded during the 2012–2018 presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, during which about 1.15 million Mexicans were intercepted.
Writing in the newspaper El Universal, columnist León Krauze noted that López Obrador said in a 2019 interview with the news agency Bloomberg that his “dream” was to reach a point in his presidency at which there would be no need for Mexicans to migrate to the United States because they had work and could be happy where they were born.
Not only has the president not achieved that goal but the migration of Mexicans has, in fact, increased, he wrote.
“About four of every 10 migrants detained on the [United States] southern border in recent weeks are of Mexican origin,” Krauze wrote, adding that “the grave trend” threatens to undo gains made over the past decade during which migration of Mexicans to the U.S. recorded negative numbers.
The columnist said there was no detailed study about the new wave of Mexican migration to the United States but contended that the causes are the same as those that drive other people in the region. Krauze cited insecurity, poverty, lack of work opportunities and climate changes as migration push factors.
“The consequences of the pandemic have been particularly harsh in Mexico, where the government has failed in the containment of the health emergency and in the management of the economic crisis. The explosion in poverty in the country has the same consequence as always: the people go to where there is … the possibility to survive,” he wrote.
The journalist asserted that López Obrador needs to urgently respond to the growing migration phenomenon, which has also been encouraged by the departure of former U.S. president Donald Trump, who enacted harsh immigration policies, and the arrival in the White House of current President Joe Biden, who rolled back some of his predecessor’s policies even as he simultaneously told migrants not to come to the U.S.
Krauze added that 2021 data shows that the government is failing in what López Obrador described as its responsibility to guarantee security, employment and well-being for the Mexican people so that they don’t have to leave their homes and seek a better life elsewhere.
“There is still time to rectify [the situation],” he wrote.
